Monday, July 7, 2008

Sweet Dreams

The past few days had been horrendous. My corporation had suffered a significant loss and I had personally lost one of my ships as well as a number of implants. I had flubbed a number of potential kills and had to abandon a perfectly good cruiser in a remote station many jumps from my home systems due to anti-pirate forces. I flipped up the scanner on my Taranis and began doing sweeps, determined to finish on a good note before docking up for the night.

Two results jumped out at me. A Brutix battlecruiser and a Myrmidon battlecruiser. I quickly dug deeper into the scanner and local system information and was able to determine that at least one of the pilots was young and inexperienced. Best of all, they were in the belts where I could safely engage! Jumping on two ships like this while flying my close range blaster Taranis would be complete suicide but I was determined to attack. I set a course for the nearby station where I have my personal hangar. I ignored the normal security precautions and almost hit another pilots Iteron industrial trying to get into the docking bay. I quickly assembled my crew and screamed at them to get railguns and speed modifications fit onto my Taranis. My only chance of testing those battlecruisers and getting out alive if things didn't go well was to be able to move fast and hit from afar.

A few minutes (but what seemed like hours) later I jumped back into my ship and roared out of the hangar without requesting the proper permission from the tower. They would be pissed later but no way was I going to let red tape get in the way of my targets. I threw myself into warp and began the process of scanning again. I had informed my corporation of what I was doing so by the time I had located the two battlecruisers, I had two gang-mates preparing their own ships to join the fight. I warped in and immediately targeted the Brutix. I scrambled his warp drives and began orbiting at a distance and with my MicrowarpDrive running at full speed. Both ships were unable to hit me with their guns and neither had drones fast enough to follow me as I orbited at over 4000m/s. I started to poke away at the Brutix with my railguns and by the time my backup arrived in the form of a Blackbird and Carcal cruiser, I had broken his shields and was eating away at his armor. I was amazed that at the speeds I was going, my railguns were still able to track and do significant damage to my targets. My improved skills along with the targets large signature radius were allowing my rail-equipped Taranis to be way more effective than I had expected.

With the Blackbird jamming both ships, the Carcal and myself both scramming and damaging the battlecruisers, we slowly but surely destroyed bothships. Excited at the fact we had just won such a decisive victory, we moved in on our victims wrecks to examine the loot. To our dismay, we found some of the worst garbage I have ever seen on ships this expensive. Lasers on a Brutix? A hull repper on the Myrmidon? ...absolutely none of their equipment was tech II yet they both have several rigs equipped? I was totally baffled by our opponents ship load-outs. We laughed and tried to figure out how these obviously inexperienced and unskilled pilots had acquired the money to buy and fit such expensive ships. Disappointed by the lack of profit but still high from the rush of combat, I docked up in the station. I ignored the yells of the angry hangar manager as I walked from my ship to my quarters and lay down in my bunk. As I drifted off to sleep, the image of my Taranis screaming by the lifeless wrecks of Gallente battlecruisers filled my head...